The idea of photos, messages and text going viral is a very modern one indeed. Or is it? NorthEastern University’s Ryan Cordell has been digging around in old American newspapers and he reckons the 1800s were alive with viral media.

He talks about his research effort, called the Infectious Texts Project, how you track viral media from the past, and what it all means for the future of communication.

Transcript

Antony Funnell: One of the things we're fond of here at Future Tense are stories that show just how circular things can be, that what we often think of as new is really just another form of something that's come before.

Now, testing that link between the future, present and past is exactly how Ryan Cordell from the Infectious Texts Project at Northeastern University has been spending his time of late.

You see, Professor Cordell and his colleagues have been trawling through tens of thousands of newspapers from the 1800s to test a hunch they have that the very modern digital-age concept of 'viral media' isn't really that modern at all.

Ryan Cordell: The more that I study 19th century newspapers, the more they remind me of web pages. In the 19th century for a lot of people the newspaper was their primary source for all kinds of reading. So in the same way that you might start up Facebook and expect to be entertained and informed and to hear about things going on around the country, it's kind of an all-purpose media, you know. You get music there, you get news stories there, you get other kinds of text that you consume there. In the 19th century the newspaper printed things that looked like news as we would recognise today. But the newspaper also printed poetry and it printed fiction and it printed short little anecdotes, it printed jokes and recipes, and for a lot of people it was that kind of one-stop shop for all kinds of content. In the same way that I think we fire up the web browser and that's our one-stop shop today.

Antony Funnell: That's going to be a bit deflating, isn't it, for some people who think with the internet, with social media in particular, that we've got something new.

Ryan Cordell: Well we certainly have new scale. When I'm looking at these stories in the 19th century I think I really have found something quite popular if it was printed in 30 or 40 or 50 newspapers. With modern social media there's a difference certainly in scale and in speed. Something can go viral overnight and the next day millions of people have seen it. The texts that we're looking at, they take weeks or sometimes months or even years actually to spread around the country. But at the same time, I'm very interested in the ways that our media practices are both different and the same, and so I am interested in teasing out these parallels between 150 years ago and today.

Antony Funnell: As you've said, the way in which things spread back in the 1800s, the way in which things went viral was very different, speed being the obvious example as you've mentioned. What were some of the factors that helped things to go viral back in those days?

Ryan Cordell: Well, it certainly helped for a piece to be short. A lot of the pieces we're finding that went viral are a few paragraphs, you know, a few inches on the page. So one thing that we know about 19th century newspapers is it was a rapidly exploding industry. Newspapers were springing up all over the place. Many towns had two, one for each major political party. There were newspapers for religious denominations, there were newspapers for political groups. But many of them had a very tiny staff, often just an editor or perhaps an editor with a few people on his staff.

So in order to put together a newspaper an editor in, say, St Louis Missouri would subscribe to newspapers all over the country, in Boston and New York and in Washington DC and in Philadelphia, and when they came in, he or one of his staff would comb through them just to find pieces that they thought that their readers would be interested in, and also to fill gaps in the newspaper. And so there would often be a person who was the exchanges editor, whose job it was to find things that were interesting and to kind of cut them out and often would actually organise them into an exchanges drawer based on length.

So these short pieces that filled space were very popular, but also pieces that played into some of the dominant concerns or even genres of the day. We know in the 19th century that a lot of novels, for instance, were very sentimental, and a lot of the pieces that we're finding that went viral are these short, domestic anecdotes about young husbands and wives, that they often have a kind of sentimental moral to them. Or they have a joke associated with them. So many of the things that go viral today—humour, sentiment—made things go viral back in the 19th century as well.

Antony Funnell: And looking back at that time, I guess you had the development of new technologies, didn't you, you had railway coming on, you had the telegraph, but you also had a very different copyright system at that time. How did that influence the way in which things went viral?

Ryan Cordell: Well, in many ways there was no copyright law to protect most of these sorts of texts, so that kind of borrowing, where one editor would just sort of clip something from another newspaper and include it in his own newspaper was entirely legal. There were really no strictures that would prevent it. And in fact the system of newspapers depended on that kind of exchange. Again, with the small staff that many of these newspapers had, they couldn't actually put together a newspaper without being able to clip and borrow from one another, they wouldn't have enough content in some of these small towns.

Antony Funnell: And in one sense that's not much different, is it, from the way in which we will share an article on social media today, or we'll share something that we like on social media without giving thought to possible copyright provisions.

Ryan Cordell: Yes, it's very similar, and again, in the same way that you might go to a website today that's a kind of aggregator of content from other places, these newspapers were in many senses aggregators. If you look at a 19th century newspaper, I sometimes begin to wonder who actually sat down and wrote anything, because it seems like everything on the page is copied from somewhere else. So yes, there's a remarkable similarity to the way that we share content online today.

Antony Funnell: For somebody like myself who's not just interested in the future but also interested in history, this is a fascinating project. But what's the value of it? Who are you hoping that this will assist in the end?

Ryan Cordell: Well, for me as a scholar of 19th century literature, what I find most valuable about it is that it gives us a peek into everyday reading during the period, and it gives us a peek into what people were encountering on a daily basis, the things that they found valuable, the things that they wanted to pass on and to share. And it's a slightly different look at the culture than you get just reading the canonical great novels of the period. I love those too. In some ways actually reading these texts gives me another window into those popular novels. You see little fragments of these kinds of viral texts in these big popular novels like Moby Dick and things of that nature.

We're also hoping to use this data to begin to model what you asked about actually, what features of the text helped it to go viral in the 19th century, and we want to begin to think about how and whether those principles could be used to understand more modern media. So some of our next steps are we're hoping to look later in the 19th century. We've only looked at before the civil war at this point. But we're hoping to look at the rest of the 19th century, the early 20th century as well, and to see the ways that viral media both is the same in different periods, but also the ways that what goes viral begins to change as you move through time.

We tend to think of technology as this exclusively modern thing, this thing that we came up with in the past decade and it's changing things right now. But these moments in the past have interesting parallels that I think can both diminish millennial and apocalyptic ideas about modern technology. We tend to either think that the internet is destroying all of human communication or that it's liberating us from past oppression. And I think looking at these previous cycles can temper both, actually, and help us see this modern moment as part of a much longer continuum of neither apocalypse nor millennium but of just human cultural development.

Antony Funnell: Ryan Cordell, from Northeastern University and primary investigator on the Infectious Texts Project, thank you very much for joining us.

Ryan Cordell: Thank you.

Guests

Ryan Cordell

Assistant Professor of English at NorthEastern University and primary investigator of the 'Infectious Texts' project.